Welcome to GoutCaster

From The Editor

Apologies to those who have been waiting. As you can see, it's been 3 months since the last issue, so GoutCaster is now officially a quarterly newsletter. The good news is that this allows us to concentrate on Gout Pal Interactive bringing you news and updates as they happen.

This issue includes:

Gout Pal Improvement Diet Launch

Guidance for eating food that you like in ways that will help your gout. No long lists of menus and recipes telling you what to eat, but ways of changing your eating habits to make your diet gout-friendly.

Out With Gout

Update on the campaign to get gout sufferers the best gout treatment.

Gout Forum Launch

Now you can talk to the whole world about your gout experiences, and the whole world can talk to you.

Recent GoutPal Changes.

New food pages.

Coming soon on GoutPal.

Planned changes to the GoutPal website as we move through 2007.

If you are reading the text only version of this newsletter, some formatting may look slightly strange. By the time you read this, the HTML version of this newsletter, and all preceding ones, should be online at:
http://www.goutpal.com/GoutCaster-backissues.html

GoutCaster Editor

Uri Khassid

Gout Diet Launch

Every gout sufferer needs to understand how food affects their condition, and most need to learn how to change their food habits. Before you start thinking this is just another call to avoid your favorite foods, let me tell you that you should never avoid food that you like - just learn how to eat all foods properly. To learn how you do this, you need to know some key background information about gout, why food is important, factors that relate to food, and why gradual change is best. Let me explain how a good gout diet plan depends on gradual lifestyle changes.

Key Gout Facts

3 Phases of Gout Treatment

The three phases of gout treatment target three different aspects of gout, and it is equally important to target these three aspects with diet. The phases are:

• Stop Triggers
• Manage Pain
• Manage Uric Acid

You can read more about this on my gout treatment page. You can see how these principles apply to food and diet on my gout diet introduction page. As well as understanding these principles, you also need to understand what causes gout pain.

How Gout Pain is Caused

We all need uric acid - it is a powerful anti-oxidant and the reason we outlive most other animals, but too much leads to uric acid crystals in and around the joints. These deposits, left untreated will gradually cause crippling joint damage, but this is not the common gout pain that we all suffer from. Uric acid crystals are painless, but the body reacts against them like a virus, causing inflammation and pain. Yet it can't kill the uric acid crystals, so your immune system hides them by coating them with protein.

A good gout diet must lower uric acid, and cause the hidden uric acid crystals to dissolve. It is vital that you do this to avoid long term joint damage, but this process causes the protein coating to shed, and the immune system will attack the uric acid crystals again until they have completely dissolved. Though research is currently underway to block this gout pain reaction, trials are in very early stages, so you had better keep the colchicine, or whichever pain-killer you prefer, to hand.

Gout and Food

My assumption is that most gout sufferers, like myself, need to lose weight. Many will have already read about gout and weight loss in my diet section. If the target weight loss figures alarm you, don't worry. The foundation of my Gout Improvement Diet is gradual change. Weight loss, though important, is only one factor.

For those people who are underweight, yet still have gout, diet is still very important. You may not need to reduced the amount you eat, but you still need to ensure that you are eating healthily, and following a lifestyle that does not make gout worse.

I'll tell you more about the other important food factors in a moment, but first let me discuss lifestyle.

Gout and Lifestyle

Walking and swimming are the best forms of exercise, as you are least likely to over-stress joints, which like any injury or trauma can raise uric acid levels. Please don't overdo exercise - just look at what you do now, and gradually do a little more each day. If you are currently consulting a doctor about any medical condition, please discuss your exercise plan with them first.

After food and exercise, you must also consider metabolism.

Balancing metabolism, food and exercise is crucial to your gout diet, irrespective of weight loss. It is very easy to manage - just eat more regularly and exercise after food rather than before.

The first step, if you tend to skip meals, is stop this and ensure you eat 3 meals per day. The first should be as soon as you can after waking, the last at least two hours before sleeping, with the other in the middle.

The next step is to reduce your meal size, replacing that food with a mid-meal snack. The snack need only be small - one or two pieces of fruit, or a small salad, or a half bowl of soup. You can substitute meal-snack-meal-snack-meal for meal-snack-meal-snack-meal-snack, or whatever combination suits you best.

The principle is to spread food so that your body takes energy from the food you eat, rather than from burning excessive amounts of body tissue. Think about your lifestyle, work patterns and exercise patterns, and eat to fuel those activities.

Gout Improvement Diet

The one major change that you must make is to drink more water. This too must become a habit so that you constantly have glass or bottle to hand. See what happened to me the day I forgot this natural remedy for gout.

The final stage of my Gout Improvement Diet (needs a snappier name?) involves gradually changing some of the food that you eat. I am not going to give you a menu and tell you what to eat, or what to avoid. The success of the GoutPal Diet (will this do?) depends on you changing your habits, not me changing them for you. Don't worry - you are not alone - if you are unhappy or unsure about any of your choices, then contact me by email, by message on any of the forms on my website, or by asking in the Gout Forum.

You could say that the GoutPal Diet isn't a diet at all, and I would agree with you. The reason is, that I do not want you to eat my diet - you probably won't like it. I want to guide you to creating your own gout friendly diet - one that you love, that you will stick to, and that will help manage your gout.

The food improvements to make to help your gout are:

Alkalize your diet

Though controversial, and certainly over-hyped by some diet selling companies, I believe a diet that mixes acid producing and alkaline producing foods in the right way can help gout. Scientific research is negligible, but I have seen improvement for myself - if you are unsure, just skip this - it is only one factor in the GoutPal Diet and you will still benefit from the others.

In a nutshell, you take a main food that you want to eat, such as meat, fish or cheese, and balance it with sufficient quantity of alkaline producing foods such as fruit or vegetables. You can refer to the Food Section of my website to see acid / alkali food tables and an explanation.

I have not published any recipes yet, but if you have a particular gout food that you thought was banned, tell me what it is, and I'll plan a tasty meal around it.

Balance Inflammatory Foods

Many foods contain natural anti-inflammatory compounds. Perhaps the best know to gout sufferers is the cherry, but there are hundreds more. Now a diet purely based on these will satisfy nobody, but all you have to do is ensure that the overall total of your food is anti-inflammatory. I use the database at NutritionData.com for this, as it is easy to use, and shows an inflammation factor for all common foods. A negative inflammation factor indicates an inflammatory effect, so all you need to do is add up the inflammation factor for each food in your meal, and make sure it is a positive figure. There is a book which explains this in more detail, including some recipes.

Eat Yourself Thinner

The final factor applies to those of us who want to lose weight. The calculation is simple - what you eat, less what you use, becomes additional body weight. So apart from gradually increasing exercise, and changing eating habits to boost the metabolism so that food is used more efficiently you just need to eat less. There are some techniques that can help you do this: -

• Always drink water with your meal (you should be doing this anyway!)
• Put your cutlery down while you slowly chew each mouthful
• Use a smaller plate
• Take a small portion knowing you can take seconds if you're still hungry
• Don't go back for seconds
• Concentrate on your meal - no TV etc
• Leave food on your plate

The problem with most of these is that they don't always stop you from eating more. If you feel hungry, you will tend to eat. But if you gradually change some of your food choices to ones that help you eat less then you will naturally lose weight. NutritionData.com assigns each food a Fullness Factor. By selecting food with a higher fullness factor, you will find it much easier to lose weight.

The best way to apply this is to start with the foods that you eat most. You can easily search for that food at NutritionData.com, and lookup the Fullness Factor. You can then look for "Better Choices for weight loss", and you will see a list of foods with a higher Fullness Factor.

I love these tools at NutritionData.com - the only downside is that there is a massive amount of information and you can often get bogged down. Over the next few weeks, as I report my progress on my GoutPal Diet, I will summarize some of my common foods, and the ones that you ask me about.

For a gout diet to be successful, it needs to consider many factors, but to be sustainable, you need to change things gradually and develop new habits. Start by understanding key facts about gout then decide if you need to lose weight as well as develop gout-friendly eating habits. Introduce small lifestyle changes and food choice improvements each week, to reinforce these habits. Before you know it you'll be healthier, fitter, and less prone to gout attacks.

Over the next few months, I will report progress on my diet plan, and tell you more details about how a few simple changes can help your gout without making you miserable. I'll demonstrate some of my food choices, and help you with any specific changes you need to make. Follow my progress at Gout Pal Interactive.

Better Gout Treatment

I've taken one step backwards to prepare this campaign better, and to focus on what gout sufferers really need (as opposed to what healthcare professionals think we need)

I have a fair idea of some of the concerns from emails and forum messages, but I'm going to add to this to get a clearer picture. As well as commenting around the site, you can now make your views known directly on a new form.

Please complete the Gout Treatment Form, as soon as you can.

Gout Forum Launch

I feel guilty that some of my email responses take several days, and I have a nagging feeling that some get missed when I put them on a "deal with it later pile".

In February, I introduced a gout forum on my Gout Pal Interactive site, and I'm amazed at the number of visitors. As with any new forum, the number of active posters needs to increase, but I'm really pleased that everyone now has a chance to discuss gout without me being a bottleneck.

I've recently introduced a new twist. When I can't find time to answer my emails I post them on the forum anonymously. This gives a chance for them to be answered by someone else, and also ensures that I won't forget them. You will probably see a few unanswered ones now. Feel free to add your views. I'll be adding mine during the calm after the newsletter storm.

Recent GoutPal Changes

GoutPal changes are mainly related to GoutPal Diet, including the aforementioned acid/alkali tables.

I appreciate the feedback about these changes, in particular the points on the Wish List. Please keep adding to this list - it really helps me to set my priorities based on what you want.

Coming Soon on GoutPal

The food and diet sections have opened up lots of opportunities for new information, and I'm working on a comprehensive search facility to find food facts that matter without wading through lots of tables. My Gout Food Analysis pages are very much a work in progress, but will eventually answer all your questions about gout food and diet.

Thank you for your comments and questions. I've got plenty of material for new ideas, but more are always welcome.

A final note of thanks from the editor

Thank you for reading this issue of GoutCaster. If you've any ideas for improving it, please write to me.

If you know anyone else who might be interested, please forward this to them. I'm particularly keen to get views from the medical profession (if I can understand them), so why not send it to your doctor? If you do forward it to someone it is a good idea to remove the final two paragraphs, which are automatically added so you can manage your subscription.

If you've been sent this by a subscriber, why not sign up for your own copy? Just fill in the free newsletter subscription form.

Thanks again for reading GoutCaster.

Uri Khassid